


taking turns

by ConvenientAlias



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 10:00:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15838950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/pseuds/ConvenientAlias
Summary: Claire and Topher were the last ones left in the Dollhouse. Now it's just Claire.Now it's just Topher.Now it's just Claire again.





	taking turns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kay_obsessive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Last Good Days](https://archiveofourown.org/works/56034) by [kay_obsessive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/pseuds/kay_obsessive). 



> This fic is a sequel to Last Good Days by kay_obsessive and will probably make more sense if you read that first.

Claire’s fingers hover over the control panel.

She is supposed to wait. She is supposed to be a guide.

She is lonely. She feels empty in a way that real shells never do, empty in a way that is actually much too full, that overflows up through her chest, up through her throat. She wants to become a real shell. Lose her mind for good. Her mind, which was never real anyway—Topher claimed it was, because he believed in imprints being people, but they both really knew, deep down, that she was always a fake. Why should she have to suffer inside her fake little brain? What is she trying to preserve?

She is supposed to be a guide.

She forces herself out of the chair.

On days when Topher was quiet, she used to walk around the Dollhouse like a patrol, checking on the potted plants that still somehow flourish, turning lights on and off, on and off. Never for long—she always had to get back to him, always worried what he might do while her back was turned. Now she wanders again. There is nothing to limit her wandering, but she comes back to his pod anyhow. Restless.

She opens the pod, half believing that his body in it will come back to life with the fresh air. But the stench that rises out discourages that thought, and she hurriedly shuts it again.

The next day she searches through the discs until she finds the one she wants. She puts it in the chair and programs the settings and sits down in the chair and

* * *

Topher never thought they’d bring him back in a woman’s body. Maybe that was thoughtless—he knows how nonessential a body is, how little it matters to an imprint—but there are usually plenty of male dolls around. It should not be too hard to bring him back in the correct body, should it?

He feels his face. He knows those scars, and he knows the body he’s been brought back into. Claire’s.

Whiskey’s, he corrects himself. This is Whiskey, not Claire, if he’s here. Claire is the woman he created, Whiskey the body. And right now this body is neither. Right now it is Topher.

It only occurs to him after a long moment of puzzlement that that’s not all that’s wrong with this picture. There is no handler at his side taking him through the process of awaking; had there been, he’s sure he wouldn’t be this close to an emotional crisis. And when he looks out the window, there is no one there either, even though all the Dollhouse’s lights are on.

His hands tighten on the chair’s grips. Where is everyone? Where is…where is Adelle, and Dominic, and where is…No, pointless to ask where Dr. Saunders is, he reminds himself, the lady is out and he is in and that is that but

where is he?

He finds a letter sitting on a keyboard. It’s addressed to him, and the writing is Claire’s. He should know. He programmed her writing once, made it a little sloppy (doctor’s handwriting) but still legible. Yes, he knows it.

“ _Dear Topher_ ,

“ _I feel bad about leaving you with all this, which will probably be beyond your comprehension, but the imprint I’m using is in perfectly fine mental health, and this body is in perfectly fine physical health, so most likely you will be, in fact, perfectly fine. I should inform you of the situation at hand…”_

The letter goes on to describe impossible things. An apocalypse brought about by projected thought. No, it’s not impossible—he knows that, he knows the risks of this technology—but it’s ridiculous. It’s, it’s the worst case scenario. Worst case scenarios don’t happen in the Dollhouse. Adelle takes care of them long before it comes down to that.

The letter does not say how this apocalypse came about, only that it is. That Topher should be careful, and that he must stay in the Dollhouse and wait for “those he must guide”. Whatever that means.

Oh, and it tells him not to go looking in the pods. So of course that’s the first thing he does. Scowly, rule following Claire is no fun, and if she thinks she can abandon him with this scant information, she is wrong.

He looks in one and then another and then another. They are mostly empty. In a few he finds scattered objects, and on some walls he finds his own handwriting, much less legible and impossible to follow. The equations are beyond his current capacity. The Topher of the present must be either a genius or a madman.

Then he comes to a pod that answers that question: Topher of the present is not a genius or a madman. He is simply dead.

* * *

Claire never intended to wake up, ever again, but she does, and she wakes with great irritation. Topher’s doing, it must be. How dare he. She had thought this through, and he…

He is not there for her to rail at. Of course he isn’t. But… she had programmed him into this body before going away, hadn’t she? Had the imprint failed?

She looks around. There are small changes in the room. Upset stacks of paper, and of course the new wedge in the chair. She looks around until she finds a letter.

“ _Dear Dr. Saunders_ ,

“ _I’m afraid if you want to leave me with such a responsibility as this you’ll have to give me more explanation. Who am I…are you…are we…waiting to guide? What caused the whole world to go kaput? Oh, and why am I dead? That seems like a relevant question!_

“ _If you want to imprint me on your body again, I am clearly in no position to stop you! But in your next letter, please could you leave me a little more information? I can’t do anything with this little to go on. What exactly do you want me to solve here? What use am I, if the world has ended? My brain isn’t going to stop the in-fighting you describe in your letter and I have no fucking idea where everyone is…”_

It went on like so. Mostly complaining.

She had forgotten that even before his breakdown Topher was always a big baby.

* * *

“ _Dear Topher,_

“ _I think I left you what information you need. Food’s still in the kitchen and plenty of it is canned or has a far away expiration date. Knowing how the world ended last time caused you to go insane so I think I’ll leave that out. I don’t really need you to pull any acts of genius. Someone needs to wait here for the new arrivals, though, and it might as well be you. There’s a wedge to imprint this body with when they come._

_“I’m sorry you saw your body. I told you not to look in the pods_.”

Topher crosses his arms. (It’s weird—he has boobs now and has to cross his arms at a different angle than he’s used to, but his body’s already accustomed to it, and that’s weird.) She thought he wouldn’t look in the pods? Well, he probably wouldn’t have gone looking in every single one of them if she hadn’t made them sound so ominous. And the fact that he’s dead is information that he kind of appreciates having.

Not that she’s explained why he’s dead.

He writes his next letter in pink gel pen because the ink in the black pen from before has run out and he’s always kept a set of gel pens around for when he needs to brainstorm extra hard. Colors help sometimes. And also he’s panicking a little, so colors are extra useful at a time like this.

But he tries to keep his tone professional, not that he’s ever been good at professional. Asks her why him, if any imprint would do. Asks permission to create a new imprint entirely, one not averse to waiting, one that she could possibly give the relevant information herself (she knows how to modify an imprint) so that neither of them will have to stick around. Because that’s not something he can do. The air is too still, too quiet.

“Where’s Adelle?” he writes. “Where’s Boyd?” Boyd, Adelle, Claire—the three constants of the Dollhouse. They should all be here, but not even Claire is, really. It’s eerie. It’s not right.

He gives Claire the body back, and she passes it back to him and as far as he can tell it’s not even been a day. The letter she’s left is short.

“ _No new imprints_.”

“Why not?” he says aloud, and his voice crackles in the quiet, too quiet air.

* * *

Topher is so impatient. Every day it seems he gives the body back to Claire. She tries to push it back to him—no, she doesn’t want this, she can’t take it, she wants to give it to him and go away—but he always just gives it back. She asks him why and he doesn’t answer. You can’t shake answers out of a man who isn’t there.

He is unafraid to ask her why, though. He tells her again and again how useless it is to give him the body, how it would be better to leave it to a different imprint, especially since she seems to be annoyed at how he’s handling it. She is annoyed. It’s true. She’ll come back and if he’s spent even a day she’ll find snacks strewn all over the room. Her carefully kept Dollhouse-standard body is beginning to gain a little weight. It’s probably the stress getting to him but damn it, the stress is getting to her, too.

But she can’t use another imprint. It has to be him. But the reasons aren’t things she can write.

“It has to be you,” she says into the empty air, “because you’re real, and they’re not.” And I’m not. “It has to be you because you did this. This is your responsibility!” And he made her, and her depression and loneliness too are his responsibility. “It has to be you because you might be able to actually help the people who come. You have a skillset…” that is more likely to get him killed if she’s honest, Topher has too much of a mouth on him. “It has to be you because…”

It has to be him because he shouldn’t be dead.

It has to be him because she misses him.

She writes him another letter scolding him for the crumbs on the floor and the wrapper tossed carelessly in a corner. This time she hasn’t cleaned up the mess. He’ll have to deal with it himself. “ _Learn some responsibility_ ,” she writes, but she pictures the Topher who died, who knew the meaning of responsibility and guilt in the end, and hopes this Topher never does, this Topher cobbled together from an old disc and stolen moments, this Topher who is purely hers. She doesn’t want him to hurt. Even bringing him back here time and time again is hurting him, but that’s something she can’t stop.

* * *

Topher starts playing with things. He makes basic radios. He makes modified imprinting machines from notes that the other Topher left behind. Toys. Weapons.

Doesn’t matter, there’s no one here to play with him and there’s no one here to fight.

“We should imprint this body with someone else,” he writes to Claire, and he wants to say they should both just die, but he can’t do it.

* * *

Claire knows what he means all the same. But she isn’t willing to give up on life just yet. She doesn’t exist, really, and never did, and Topher doesn’t really exist anymore either. But she is unwilling to let go of his ghost, and of the ghost of herself. She will stay a while longer.

Besides, there will be others who will come here. And they will need a guide. She needs to wait.

**Author's Note:**

> To kay_obsessive: I really admire your Dollhouse fic, so I hope you enjoyed this remix :)


End file.
